


Last night i had the strangest dream that you knew me too

by engeeo



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe, Animal Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Patricide, Political Assassination, astrid thinks about fate and relationships and navigates the aftermath of her actions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 23:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30063126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engeeo/pseuds/engeeo
Summary: One warm, summer evening, Astrid watches her best friend kill his parents. His name is Bren Aldric Ermendrud, and he has been her best friend for more years of her life than he has not.Or, 5+1 universes in which they've killed their parents.
Relationships: Astrid & Eadwulf & Caleb Widogast, Astrid/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Last night i had the strangest dream that you knew me too

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags! There are multiple references to and a semi-graphic description of animal death.

One warm, summer evening, Astrid watches her best friend kill his parents.

The weather is balmier than most nights in the Zemni Fields. In a month’s time, she knows, the weather will turn cool and the leaves will change color. Harvest Close will arrive: families will decorate their homes with streamers of cloth, dyed in all shades of red, orange, and yellow by their little ones, and the older children will walk behind their parents balancing baskets overflowing with corn and wheat. As is tradition, the farmer with the fattest pig will parade it around town before taking it behind the barn, a quick axe swing to run the ground black with its blood.

Blumenthal’s festivities seem humble to her now. Two autumns spent in Rexxentrum, and she has already sampled more exotic confections and drinks than her parents have in their lifetimes. She has clapped along to the Empire’s finest musicians and gasped at fearless jugglers and fire breathers, her fingers clasped tight around the single gold piece in her pocket. Her other hand swung from her side, grasped in the embrace of another.

His name is Bren Aldric Ermendrud, and he has been her best friend for more years of her life than he has not.

They are standing in front of a burning house in the Zemni Fields, her hand gripping his tightly, the sounds of shouting echoing from inside. The door rattles fruitlessly against the wagon blocking the exit. There is a pounding at the door - once, twice - and the continuous crackle of flames licking wood. Smoke billows into the air, stinging her eyes, but she does not cry.

Bren mutters something she cannot hear. He stares into the fire, and his grip on her loosens. He reaches out for the flames, mindlessly pulling her along as he begins to trudge forward.

Eadwulf is the first to react. “Bren,” he says. He lays a heavy hand on his shoulder. Wulf has grown rapidly in the past few years, quickly overtaking Astrid and Bren’s head start. He has started carrying himself like a Man now, even though he is younger than both of them. He spends more time with the older boys at the Academy, after classes when they hit each other with sticks and bang their heads against rocks (at least, this is what Astrid assumes they do). But every evening he comes back to the library and dutifully copies his scrolls with the both of them, hunched under the same candlelight and sharing the same warmth. He lets them lean against him when they sneak back to their dorms after lights out, giggling the whole way.

Bren shoves his hand off and keeps walking.

“ _ Mutter _ ,” he says. “ _ Vater _ .” He repeats the words like he’s memorizing the verbal components of a particularly tricky spell. Astrid grips his hand tight, arm outstretched, to keep him from flinging himself into the flames. 

“Bren,” she hisses in warning. “They’re traitors.” She is too young to articulate this, but not so naive that she cannot comprehend it: the reasoning is peripheral to the completion of the task. The bird does not ask why it is pushed from the nest; the corn does not ask why it is ground into meal. The pig does not ask why it bleeds.

Bren does not seem to hear her, because his chanting grows increasingly fervent and high-pitched. “ _ Mutter _ ,” he calls in a wretched, strangled voice. He tries to wrench his wrist from Astrid’s grasp. “ _ Vater _ !”

The smoke is growing thicker now, black and acrid. There is the faint sound of coughing inside, then outside, as Wulf doubles over, covering his face with his arm.

“Let me go!” Bren shouts, fighting her grip. His face is coated in soot from his proximity to the fire, which roars in the silence of the night air. Rivulets stream from his eyes and nose. “ _ Mutter _ !  _ Vater _ !” With a final jerk of his body, he tears himself from her grasp and throws himself against the flaming wagon barring the door. Again, and again, he rams his shoulders into the burning wood. A smoldering beam crashes through the front of the home, sending splinters flying and knocking Bren onto his back. The roof is beginning to collapse.

“Bren!” Astrid rushes forward, wrapping her arms around him and dragging his body through the grass. She hears Wulf close behind.

“Let go of me!” he yells. He frantically flails his arms around, his fists beating against her shoulders. Astrid, in the back of her mind, remembers the winter she turned ten - there is a dog in her arms, and she loves him very much. He is very sick. Her father presses a pillow to his face, and he spasms in her arms until he dies. She buries him in the flower fields, crying until their blossoms bloom in the spring.

Bren shrieks an unholy sound, and the flare of heat at the side of her neck is the only warning before the searing pain. She yelps in surprise, giving Bren just enough leeway to wrest himself from her grasp. He races towards the smoldering building; the roof is gone, charred black and collapsed. The fire shows no sign of stopping. He races across the grass, ready to fling himself into the wreckage when Wulf tackles him from behind, the two of them tumbling together on the ground.

Bren is screaming. He doesn’t move from where he is pinned to the ground, his body convulsing in sobs. She hears him somewhere far away. The blood pounds in her brain like a war drum. Several thoughts clamor for attention in her head, including, first: She will never see her parents again. She will never see  _ him  _ again. Something irrevocable has taken place tonight, she knows, threads that have been severed that can never be put back together. This is, she realizes, fate - in every plane, every universe, the events of tonight are unerringly the same.

***

In the basement of the Assembly headquarters, the ticking of a clock is driving Astrid mad.

She drums her fingertips against the flimsy wood of her desk. She wishes the agency had bothered to fit her office with one of those new digital clocks. Instead they’ve crammed her, a splintering desk, and a chunky personal computer into a converted storage closet, leaving little room for any of her belongings. In the top right hand corner of her room, there is a tiny window that doesn’t open. Through it, she can see the passing feet of people outside.

“Nice place,” a voice says from the doorway. Eadwulf is standing there with his arms crossed, tie loosened, one end of his lips pulled into a sympathetic smirk. He makes a show of taking in the room. “I didn’t think he’d be so hard on you.”

Astrid huffs, her coat’s padded shoulders rising and falling in resignation. “How is life on the surface?”

“Not the same without you,” he admits. He looks over his shoulder furtively before adding: “The desk beside mine is still empty. I hear Ikithon will promote you before the week is over.”

She shrugs and looks away. The discrepancy between her and Eadwulf’s status as agents has little to do with her skills, she knows. This is punishment for her failures the months before. She let him go. At the memory, she reaches instinctively for the scar around her neck.

“Have you seen him recently?” Wulf asks softly. They don’t talk about the third, empty desk by his station on the top floor. They don’t know if it will ever be filled.

“No,” she says. She wrings her hands in front of her stomach. “I am stopping by Vergesson today. Will you come?”

What she likes best about Wulf is that he does not try to make a situation something it is not; he offers no platitudes about grief or blame or justifications for their actions. He understands, as well as she does, that they are tasked only with what is necessary to keep their country safe. They cannot afford to have any delusions about where their loyalties lie. 

“Of course,” he says.

She nods in gratitude. She knew he would agree. She hopes, one day, that Bren will understand, too.

***

Astrid Beck is hundreds of light-years away from Rexxentrum when she gets the message.

She’s undercover in Port Damali, a major spaceport for trade on the edge of Concord space. The synthetic hum of incoming and departing ships is constant, as is the chatter of travelers from all over the galaxy. Everywhere she looks, credits exchange hands, and goods are passed both under and over merchants’ tables. 

It is unremarkable as far as port cities go - eleven years of Scourger work has sent her across the known galaxies, from floating metropolises to underwater domes, and she no longer feels the same sense of wonder she once did as a child. She is no longer that child, after all - but the young, wide-eyed girl from that frozen rock of a planet enters her mind often. That is who she fights for.

As she thinks this, the HUD of her ocular implants lights up, identifying her target deep within the throng of the marketplace. He wears a dark beard, tied into a tail at the end, and slouches when he steps. Framing his face is a strong, square jaw that juts out when he laughs. He does so now, crouched low to the floor to speak to a child next to her mother, his eyes crinkling along the grooves of well-worn wrinkles.

Her hand reaches inside her duster as she steps forward. Not while the child is watching. Another step, and her target rises to his feet, ruffles the girl’s hair, and nods at her mother. He has promised too much to them, too much to the rabble of the Port. If he rises, they will bring down the city’s gilded inner wards and the Empire’s allies within. He steps away. There are trade negotiations underway, she tells herself. The Empire needs Port Damali’s support. Without it, children in both the Concord and Empire will starve. He walks. Astrid is an arm’s length behind.

When she pulls the silenced gun from her cloak, he is already spinning, but too late - the cybernetics in her arm make her faster, stronger. She has, quite literally, been made for this. When she fires, she does not think about the hungry children in the galaxy, or the Empire, or even that this man smiles so much like her father once did. She sees the path laid out in front of her, and she watches her foot take another step forward. She has no delusions of choice. She is Death, and she is Time, and her march is uninterruptible.

A message flickers to life in her vision: 

_ Bren has escaped _ .

***

The year is 1890. The National Cat Club is hosting their annual cat show at London’s Crystal Palace.

Astrid holds a grated carrier with her cat sleeping inside, a white, flat-faced Persian that maintains its haughty expression even as it sleeps. Cat hair is everywhere, scattered across its container, the cloth that covers it, even her clothes. A stray hair tickles her nose, causing her to sneeze.

“ _ Gesundheit _ ,” Wulf says beside her. He is dressed in traditional British wear à la mode, a sharp coat and tight shirt that he looks rather stuffed into. In his carrier is a similarly large cat, cramped into the small space. It’s an American cat, she knows, a heavy Maine Coon with striped brown fur. He blinks his eyes slowly at her, his massive paws tucked under his large frame.

They look up at the crystalline windows of the Palace. Their contact is another American - an eccentric, Rupert Merriweather, who has been hiring private contractors from across the globe. They are scheduled to meet with him in an hour.

A shoulder gently bumps into her right arm, and someone stretches out their hand for her to take. “Shall we,  _ Frau _ Wagner?”

She smiles graciously and takes it. His hands are warm through her gloves. “ _ Mein Herr _ ,” she greets.

He presses a kiss to the back of her gloved hand. The charade is an old schtick by now, the fanciful concoction of excitable teenagers. It has been nearly 15 years now since they were hand-picked from obscurity to serve a greater cause; thirteen since they passed their initiations with flying colors. They have been inseparable for longer still.

The gentleman smiles and releases her hand. He has grown so much from the boy he once was. They all have. He is taller now, his face cleanly-shaven and short, red-brown hair parted to the side. Dangling from his side is a matching crate - inside, a wild-looking spotted cat paces back and forth, its tail lashing against the metal wires. She remembers from their debriefing that this exotic cat is their ticket in, a feral cross between the wild leopard cat and a domestic breed. The Cat Club had been particularly keen to get their hands on it. She imagines if it had not been for its handler, neither she nor Wulf could have persuasively convinced the organizers that they could calm this specimen. Even now, when she gets too close to it, it hisses and peels back its lips in an angry scowl.

“Careful,” the man says. He places his fingers by the cage and lets the cat sniff at him, smiling to himself. She knows, without asking, that he will go through unnecessary lengths to keep this cat with him after the mission. She has already accounted for this in their escape plans.

“Shall we?” Wulf asks, gesturing towards the Palace.

Astrid nods. They have already scouted every entrance and exit, mapped every corridor, and read every receipt Merriweather has ever left in his lifetime. They know their fellow contractors inside and out. Astrid knows that overconfidence is the deadliest assassin, but she cannot help but feel cautiously optimistic about this mission. “In a minute,” she says, allowing herself the uncommon luxury of hope. “We still have time.”

***

It is a warm summer day. Astrid lies on her back in a meadow, letting the sweet smell of flowers float around her. The horn of a train blows far, far away in the distance. She is fourteen and cannot imagine being a day older. There is a boy of the same age next to her, his pinky resting against her own. She has known him for more years of her life than she has not.

Her skirt flutters in the breeze, waving gently alongside the grass of the idyllic hills. The weather is perfect - the sun is warm without the heat overwhelming. The entirety of her universe has narrowed into this tiny pinpoint in time, this singular moment in which she rests finger-to-finger with her best friend this particular summer of her life.

“Did you get your letter from the Academy?” he asks, breaking the silence. Bren spins onto his side so he is facing her. He rests his head under his arm, the other reaching over his body so the tips of his fingers rest just across from hers. “Wulf got his last week.”

Astrid closes her eyes. The sunlight illuminates her face so that she sees the rosy salmon of her eyelids instead of darkness. “No,” she says. Bren had been the first to receive it, of course - an invitation to study at the Soltryce Academy, out in the Capital. She’d long dreamt about Rexxemtrum and how magical it would be to live there. Their parents would probably take them in a wagon, the three of them - her, Bren, and Wulf - pressed together in the back with their suitcases, her father seated at the helm. He’d drive them to the train station, press a coin into each of their hands, and wave them goodbye from the platform. The boys would try to spend their coins on the overpriced sweets sold on the train, and she would lecture them about how many different kinds of candies they could get once they were in the city. Blumenthal would grow smaller and smaller on the horizon until it disappeared entirely. 

“Have you?” she finally asks.

She doesn’t have to look to see Bren flush. He’s her only peer that reads more than her. Whatever fantasies she has about being whisked off to the Academy, he must have tenfold. “Yes,” he admits. “I got my letter yesterday.”

Her heart sinks. She is standing at the platform, watching the train recede in the distance. How unfair this life is, she thinks miserably.

“But -” Bren adds quickly “- and I talked to Wulf and he agreed - we will not go without you.”

Astrid turns her head to face him, resting her hands together on her stomach. “No,” she says firmly. “You should go. You have to go.”

“It won’t be the same without you,” he insists. “Besides, you are the one who wanted to go in the first place. Wulf and I want to be wherever you are.”

Either he is saying this just to comfort her, or, Astrid suspects, Bren does not understand what he is offering. The Academy is their key out, and she will not be the shackle that chains them here.

“Or,” Bren continues, “you can take one of our invitations. Pretend to be one of us.”

“There are only two invitations,” she points out. “We will be separated anyways.”

Bren stares at the ground, embarrassed. “Ah. Yes.” He starts plucking at the grass, one by one, stacking them in a neat pile in front of his chest. “Well, the first offer still stands.”

“It’s okay,” she says, even though it is not. There is a dreadful feeling in her chest that their lives will go on without her - that she will stagnate where she is, a withering marker of their lives before that will only remind them how far they have traveled from home.

“I’m serious,” Bren says. He pushes himself to his knees, pulling from the pocket of his pants a piece of paper that has been carefully pressed in half. Astrid looks up at him, unmoving, her eyes wide. “I don’t want to be somewhere you’re not.” He unfurls the letter and holds its top edge between the thumb and forefinger of either hand.

“Bren,” she warns. She braces an elbow under herself. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t moved, but she will not allow him to throw away his life for her.

His face furrows in concentration as his fingers tremble. The paper, almost imperceptibly, begins to tear.

“Astrid!” a voice calls from across the meadow. The two of them instinctually turn towards the sound of a familiar voice. It’s Astrid’s mother, one hand clutching the front of her skirt, the other waving a piece of paper above her head. “Your letter arrived!”

She and Bren look at each other at the same time. Bren is the first to react, laughing and throwing his arms around her for a hug. He immediately pulls back, blushing, but Astrid laughs deliriously and buries her face into his shoulder. Her laughter uncontrollably gives way to sobs - she is barely cognizant of this transformation, recognizing only the dampness of Bren’s shirt against her face - as she pulls him close, hiding her face from her mother, she feels the tangled tendrils in her stomach uncoil in relief. 

She has made it. Behind her eyelids, Astrid watches her path unfold in front of her, beckoning her into the beyond. Beside her are her best friends. They are with her at the beginning, and, Astrid prays, they will be with her until the end.

***

The staircase winds an efficient path to the upper levels of the wizard’s tower.

Astrid takes the steps two at a time, her body moving on the instincts of a chase. She remembers, distantly, a royal hunt the king had once invited the Assembly to. They were scholars, not hunters, Ikithon had politely informed him, hovering just behind the king as they stalked through the woods. However, he added, their apprentices would be more than happy to participate.

Just opposite the mages was the king’s kennel master, who had brought his finest scent hounds to hunt. They were proud, floppy-eared dogs with pale coats and black noses, their heads on a constant swivel for the scent of their prey. Astrid found them beautiful. When the kennel master gave the signal, the dogs stood stock-still, straight as an arrow from nose to tail. Astrid saw Ikithon raise his hand, too, and paused. The king nodded - the dog handler whistled, the mages pointed, and the dogs were off like bolts into the underbrush, Astrid and a handful of other Assembly proteges close behind.

In hindsight, Astrid realizes the invitation to hunt was never intended for the Assembly. Two of the dogs had bled to their deaths chasing their quarry. DeRogna’s apprentice twisted an ankle and snapped at anyone who offered to help her. The kennel master apologized profusely; DeRogna pressed her lips into so thin a line they nearly disappeared. Astrid remembers dropping the bloody head of a cockatrice at Ikithon’s feet, her heart swelling with pride as he congratulated her, nodding to the king and smirking at DeRogna.

Something grips her heart at the memory. Her lungs burn. There’s a loud commotion on the floor above, the sound of something whirring and clicking and voices overlapping as the party barks commands and reassurances at each other. She’s thrust violently back into the present. Astrid’s heart races so loudly she can hear the blood pumping in her ears. She can hear his voice. The next floor arrives too quickly.

She watches her hand fly towards the door handle. It turns without resistance, revealing a study awash in the golden light of the setting sun. There are new faces - a tall, beautiful woman clutching her robes and a halfling child so small he could disappear in his mother’s dress - but Astrid has eyes only for one face in the crowd. She spots him immediately.

His head is framed by the window, hair ablaze in the sunset. In one hand, he holds a scroll; in the other, a buzzing tuning fork pulses with magical energy. He is murmuring the verbal components of what she recognizes as a teleportation spell. He locks eyes with her, his mouth continuing to speak in small, nervous mutters as he never breaks eye contact, as though afraid the spell he must maintain is the one between them.

Without realizing it, her arm stretches out towards him. Her wrist turns in a familiar motion - she knows he must recognize it. Eyes wide and unblinking, he keeps chanting. The scroll begins to flutter closed in slow motion. She thinks several things at once:

It is a beautiful evening on the coast of Nicodranas.

She is thirty-three years old.

His name is Caleb Widogast, and his path has diverged from hers for more years than it has been entwined. She watches her thread be pulled forward by an unseen force, the path before her forking into a hundred-pointed star. He watches her - neither ahead nor behind, but parallel - a hundred more realities extending from his position. Their paths cross and stray, continue and end. A million different possibilities, and they have led her here. 

Her hand falls. The spell completes, and he disappears. The extraneous spokes of her thread fall away, revealing the path that remains.

She lets him go.


End file.
